Review by Booklist Review
Honor Levy's collection of short-fiction vignettes explores coming-of-age in the internet era. Written in varying perspectives, from stream of consciousness internet lingo to narrative first person, the stories in My First Book introduce characters attempting to understand their identities, relationships, and sense of self in a world defined by life online. In "Hall of Mirrors," narrator Mollie recognizes her privilege as a white college student while volunteering with children whose parents don't pay attention like hers did. Later, in "Z Was for Zoomer," fashioned as a glossary of terms, she debates the virtue of caring about anything when horrors confront her everywhere, yet she takes no action to oppose them. Levy's characters grapple with the Trump presidency, #MeToo, and the sense of nihilism of the current cultural moment. A fluency in recent popular culture and trending news is necessary to fully engage with these stories, as Levy's experimental and creative writing draws on a variety of media references. A fascinating take on Gen Z life, lived online.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The stories in Levy's crackling debut collection gleefully mix high and low culture and brim with youthful wisdom. The characters in "Love Story" are sketched with terms from ancient history and the internet: "He was in his fall of Rome era. She was serving sixth and final mass extinction realness. His face was a marble statue. Her face was an anime waifu." In "Z Was for Zoomer," which is framed as a glossary of Gen Z slang ("Fail" means "to mess up big time... to get hurt, to fall, to break, to destroy"), Levy expresses nostalgia for a time before the niche humor of memes ("We even make memes about this, our failure to understand anything but memes"). "Pillow Angels" chronicles the exploits of four high school best friends in Los Angeles who get nose jobs, use cocaine, and turn a bathroom into a "Roman vomitorium." Some of the cultural descriptions feel perfunctory, but Levy shines when capturing her characters' existential dread, as in "Written by Sad Girl in the Third Person": "She wants a cigarette or an agent... or peace in the Middle East... or to be no one or to be someone." Levy announces herself as an astute interpreter of Zoomer culture. Agents: Abbie Walters and Mollie Glick, CAA. (May)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Part essay, part story, part diatribe, part diary--even part dictionary--this book defies definition. The narrators of this collection--a loose compilation of short works cut from Gen Z angst and internet gobbledygook--share more than a milieu. In "Love Story," the fairytales of our youth are supplanted, "Once upon a time" replaced with "He was giving knight errant, organ-meat eater, Byronic hero....She was giving damsel in distress, pill-popper pixie dream girl." Later on, "Halloween Forever" showcases another form of affection, that between an internet rabbit-hole denizen and "her" FBI agent, the one the meme says must be watching her. "Internet Girl" catalogs the protagonist's descent into the digital, from Neopets to naked chat rooms. Managing to reference 2 Girls 1 Cup and 9/11 in a single sentence, the narrator continues apace, jumping from cultural touchstone to cultural touchstone without stopping for breath. The collection does take the occasional detour across a more traditional narrative arc, as in "Cancel Me," in which the main character is locked out of a party. Standing in the rain with two dimwitted stand-ins for male mediocrity, she contemplates cancel culture, absolution, and, not for the last time, edgelords. The first-person narrators of these stories, only one of whom is named, share a hodgepodge of leftist beliefs not quite coherent enough to serve as evidence in the debate over whether they are in fact the same person. This book is billed as fiction, a truth that may recurrently shock the reader. The fictionality here is another layer to be parsed, along with thick films of irony and sincerity that demand to be scrubbed through by hand. If you text with a single index finger, steer clear. The girls who inhabit this world are only occasionally wise, but always clever. Oddly exquisite. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
